Free Press Staff Writer

If you go:

Sure, the Zac Brown Band is most often referred to as a country band; Grammy nominations for Best Country Album and Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals will do that to a band.

You could argue, though, that the country-rock-crossover sound of the group that won a Grammy in 2009 for Best New Artist and sells millions of albums helped pave the way for rootsy rock bands such as Mumford & Sons and The Avett Brothers to become big deals in the U.S.

“I hope so, man,” Coy Bowles, guitarist and keyboard player for the Zac Brown Band, said in a phone interview this month from his home in Atlanta. “I think that’s my favorite style of music. I like music that not only has a pop melody to it but is also deeply about something.”

The Zac Brown Band comes Sunday to the Champlain Valley Fair, a place known for its marquee country shows. Bowles, however, likes that the Zac Brown Band doesn’t fit so neatly in that genre.

“I never thought we were a country band in the first place,” he said. “I think we’ve gotten ourselves into a place where we don’t underestimate our listeners and what potential there is for the music they’ve heard all their lives.”

Some of the band’s fans, Bowles noted, grew up hearing country-rock bands such as The Eagles. “We try not to think that our listeners are one-track-minded people with the music they listen to,” he said.

Bowles, for instance, played grunge rock in his first band. “We don’t necessarily play a lot of barre-chord Nirvana kind of tunes,” Bowles said, “but the energy and the idea of what they were doing with music – we all listened to that stuff. Everybody in the band probably listened to (the Pearl Jam album) ‘Ten’ as much as anything.”

The Zac Brown Band continues to parlay its country-rock hybrid into commercial success, even in this day of dwindling CD sales. The group’s new album, “Uncaged,” sold a quarter of a million copies in its first week of release last month.

“We were stoked, man,” Bowles said. “We do and do not care about that stuff. Ultimately we do but people always ask – it’s like we don’t have a ceremony or something. Really, it’s like somebody gets a Google alert on their phone and someone says, ‘Hey, we just sold 250,000 copies’ and we say, ‘Cool, great.’”

The band is apparently not too big to have a little fun at the Champlain Valley Fair. Bowles doesn’t have kids, but he expects the band members that do will go for rides “and kind of dork-out” while at the fair.

Sometimes while on tour, he said, he’ll get stuck at a venue and never really venture out. That likely won’t happen Sunday while he’s within striking distance of the Champlain Valley Fair’s midway.